Measuring the mass of a celestial body is one of the most challenging tasks in observational astronomy. The most successful method uses binary systems because the orbital parameters of the system depend on the two masses. ...

On Nov. 11, 2014, a global network of telescopes picked up signals from 300 million light years away that were created by a tidal disruption flare—an explosion of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a black hole rips ...

NASA has powered on its latest space payload to continue long-term measurements of the Sun's incoming energy. Total and Spectral solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1), installed on the International Space Station, became fully ...

It might sound like something from a science fiction plot – astronauts traveling into deep space being bombarded by cosmic rays – but radiation exposure is science fact. As future missions look to travel back to the moon ...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists are part of a national planetary defense team that designed a conceptual spacecraft to deflect Earth-bound asteroids and evaluated whether it would be able to nudge ...

Trailing Earth's orbit at 94 million miles away, the Kepler space telescope has survived many potential knock-outs during its nine years in flight, from mechanical failures to being blasted by cosmic rays. At this rate, the ...

Notanee Bourassa knew that what he was seeing in the night sky was not normal. Bourassa, an IT technician in Regina, Canada, trekked outside of his home on July 25, 2016, around midnight with his two younger children to show ...

Though once big enough to swallow three Earths with room to spare, Jupiter's Great Red Spot has been shrinking for a century and a half. Nobody is sure how long the storm will continue to contract or whether it will disappear ...

European astronomers have detected eight new "hot Jupiter" exoplanets as part of the WASP-South transit survey. The newly discovered gas giants have short orbital periods and masses ranging from 0.42 to 5.2 Jupiter masses. ...

A team of researchers at the Parkes Observatory in NSW Australia has reported recording the brightest fast radio burst (FRB) yet on March 9 of this year. They describe it as having a high signal-to-noise ratio with an "orientation ...

Asteroids and comets appear to be a much more important supplier of organic molecules on Mars than expected. Until now, astronomers assumed that the organics on Mars mainly came from dust particles from space. Now, computer ...

Using Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) mounted on the Subaru Telescope, astronomers have identified nearly 200 "protoclusters," the progenitors of galaxy clusters, in the early universe, about 12 billion years ago, about ten times ...

A team of researchers from the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and Germany has found evidence suggesting that a type of star formation near the center of the Milky Way is responsible for large gamma ray emissions, not dark matter. ...

Engineers removed the combined optics and science instruments of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope from their shipping container in a high bay at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach, California, on March 8, ...

Using VST ATLAS and WISE surveys astronomers have identified two new bright high-redshift quasars. The newly found quasi-stellar objects, designated VST-ATLAS J158.6938-14.4211 and VST-ATLAS J332.8017-32.1036, could be helpful ...

A research team led by Teruyuki Hirano of Tokyo Institute of Technology's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences has validated 15 exoplanets orbiting red dwarf systems. One of the brightest red dwarfs, K2-155 that is ...

Water is crucial for life, but how do you make water? Cooking up some H2O takes more than mixing hydrogen and oxygen. It requires the special conditions found deep within frigid molecular clouds, where dust shields against ...

The more solar observatories, the merrier: Scientists have developed new models to see how shocks associated with coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, propagate from the Sun—an effort made possible only by combining data from ...

Elon Musk has a reputation for pushing the envelop and making bold declarations. In 2002, he founded SpaceX with the intention of making spaceflight affordable through entirely reusable rockets. In April of 2014, his company ...

Mathematical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking was best known for his work exploring the relationship between black holes and quantum physics. A black hole is the remnant of a dying supermassive star that's fallen ...

Some of the universe's greatest mysteries could soon be resolved thanks to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a huge radio telescope that will be built in South Africa and Australia. Several EPFL labs are involved in this ...

A NASA-funded cube satellite built and operated by CU Boulder researchers will study the inner radiation belt of Earth's magnetosphere, providing new insight into the energetic particles that can disrupt satellites and threaten ...

Next year marks the 20th anniversary of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory launch into space. The Crab Nebula was one of the first objects that Chandra examined with its sharp X-ray vision, and it has been a frequent target ...

How can we build a habitat on an ice-covered planet? The Swiss Space Center (SSC) has entered a partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) to prepare ESA_Lab@CH and is inviting students in Switzerland and elsewhere ...

Not everyone gets to become a part of history, but mathematician Billie Robertson is one of the lucky ones. In this image taken on Nov. 27, 1972, she was running a real-time simulation of Translunar Injection (TLI) Go-No-Go ...

Researchers have designed carbon aerogels that can be reversibly stretched to more than three times their original length, displaying elasticity similar to that of a rubber band. By adding reversible stretchability to aerogels' ...

A team of researchers from Korea, the U.K. and Denmark has found fossilized brains of sea creatures that lived during the Cambrian explosion. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes ...

Millions of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans are performed each year to diagnose health conditions and perform biomedical research. The different tissues in our bodies react to magnetic fields in varied ways, allowing ...

This year's unexpectedly aggressive flu season reminds everyone that although the flu vaccine can reduce the number of people who contract the virus, it is still not 100 percent effective. Researchers report that a tweak ...

For centuries, scientists and scholars have measured the influence of individuals and discoveries through citations, a crude statistic subject to biases, politics and other distortions. A new paper led by the Knowledge Lab ...

The world drinks a lot of wine, and that means a lot of grapes are consumed every year. But not every part of the grape ends up in the bottle. Seeds, stalks and skins—roughly a quarter of the grapes —- are typically discarded ...

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed new wound dressings that dramatically accelerate healing ...

Setting off smoke bombs is more than good fun on the Fourth of July. The military uses smoke grenades in dangerous situations to provide cover for people and tanks on the move. But the smoke arms race is on. Increasingly, ...

The Colonial Pipeline, which carries fuel from Texas to New York, ruptured last fall, dumping a quarter-million gallons of gas in rural Alabama. By the time the leak was detected during routine inspection, vapors from released ...

Rumour has it that Albert Einstein spent his last few hours on Earth scribbling something on a piece of paper in a last attempt to formulate a theory of everything. Some 60 years later, another legendary figure in theoretical ...

British billionaire businessman Sanjeev Gupta will built the world's biggest battery in South Australia, officials said Friday, overtaking US star entrepreneur Elon Musk's project in the same state last year.

Piezoelectric materials, which generate an electric current when compressed or stretched, are familiar and widely used: think of lighters that spark when you press a switch, but also microphones, sensors, motors and all kinds ...

A novel quantum effect observed in a carbon nanotube film could lead to the development of unique lasers and other optoelectronic devices, according to scientists at Rice University and Tokyo Metropolitan University.

For biologists, a single cell is a world of its own: It can form a harmonious part of a tissue, or go rogue and take on a diseased state, like cancer. But biologists have long struggled to identify and track the many different ...

An unexpected phenomenon known as zero field switching (ZFS) could lead to smaller, lower-power memory and computing devices than presently possible. The image shows a layering of platinum (Pt), tungsten (W), and a cobalt-iron-boron ...

Michigan auditors who conducted a fake "phishing" attack on 5,000 randomly selected state employees said Friday that nearly one-third opened the email, a quarter clicked on the link and almost one-fifth entered their user ...

By analysing a prehistoric site in the Libyan desert, a team of researchers from the universities of Huddersfield, Rome and Modena & Reggio Emilia has been able to establish that people in Saharan Africa were cultivating ...

Photonics researchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have achieved the extra-ordinary by creating a diode consisting of light that can be used, for the first time, in miniaturised photonic circuits, as published ...

Birds do it and so do doughnut-shaped fusion facilities called "tokamaks." But tokamak chirping— a rapidly changing frequency wave that can be far above what the human ear can detect—is hardly welcome to researchers who ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Interest in human evolution has stimulated new geological work in the southern rift valley of Kenya. A new Geological Society of America Bulletin article by Anna K. Behrensmeyer and colleagues presents ...

A team of researchers with members from several institutions in France has found a new way to study cell lineage over multiple generations. They developed a device (which they call a "mother machine") that is capable of separating ...